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- technews
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The ODPC had in May this year instructed the crypto startup to stop iris scans and the collection of facial recognition and other personal data in Kenya, a letter sent to Worldcoin and seen by TechCrunch shows.
Tools for Humanity, the company building Worldcoin, did not stop taking biometric data until early this month when Kenya’s ministry of interior and administration, a more powerful entity, suspended it following its official launch.
This cessation should be implemented without delay and should include all ongoing and future data processing activities,” said Rose Mosero, in a letter to Tools for Humanity that outlined the concerns.
The deputy data commissioner of compliance, Oscar Otieno, in an affidavit filed in court in August, said that it started the “assessment” of the respondents (Tools for Humanity and Sense Marketing Limited) in 2022.
Alongside the many issues that skeptical peers in the technology industry have been raising about the Worldcoin project and its bigger business ambitions, there are growing concerns about how those efforts to build a biometric database using the promise of free cryptocurrency have exploited economically disadvantaged people.
An MIT Technology Review investigation — published last year — found that it “used deceptive marketing practices, was collecting more personal data than it acknowledged, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent.”
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